441–450 of 630 posts
The main discussion was here in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411227 and the same topic was discussed here in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407678
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> I don't see how it implies this. Gender disparity fell in those professions, while in roughly the same time frame, gender disparity dramatically increased in STEM. If women could put up with the sexism in those two professions, is it really plausible that sexism is the reason they didn't similarly push into STEM? Engineers would have had to have been a lot more sexist to explain this data.
>Engineers would have had to have been a lot more sexist to explain this data. I think in general among engineers there is a lot of awareness about sexism and diversity issues but that doesn't always extend to people on the periphery of the engineering world (I'm from non-software engineering world). Tradespeople such a boilermakers, fitters and welders as well as suppliers, technicians etc don't always have the same…
Absolutely, but the question being debated is whether this is worse in STEM than other professions. Every profession still has strides to make for true equality.
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Most people, period, are not interested in programming a computer all day. My girl child likes trucks, not Frozen, and the pressure from other adults to get her to conform and play with Disney-branded dolls is non-trivial and unrelenting. Ugh.
> the pressure from other adults to get her to conform and play with Disney-branded dolls is non-trivial and unrelenting Throw them out, seriously. I did when they got to be too large a portion of the toys.
It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in. And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental l…
This article implies that the correlation between gender-opportunity and representation in STEM is a causation. Look at the chart in the article, look at the countries on each end of the opportunity spectrum. There are many obvious economic, societal, and cultural differences between the countries on one side and the other of that spectrum. To take this correlation and use it to forward a sexist idea (that women PREF…
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Media representation? Female lawyers and female doctors are fairly common in media. Female engineers, not so much, and definitely not in a context where the women are not deviating from social norms (you need to be a tomboy, you need to be geeky, you need to be "not like those other girls" etc.) Representation is important - MLK convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek because she was, at the time, the only bl…
How many engineers are represented in the media in general? Has there been a hit TV show with male engineers as the main character?
The same cannot be said for the legion "quirky female hacker" characters that exist in many TV shows.
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How many engineers are represented in the media in general? Has there been a hit TV show with male engineers as the main character?
How big a hit? Halt and Catch Fire fictionalized a lot but two of the four leads were software and hardware engineers, The Expanse has the primary hardware/software hacker on the ship as one of the four main characters but it's a woman, Person of Interest had two of the four main characters be software programmers, one a man and one a woman, Mr Robot has software developers for most roles besides gangster and law enf…
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In the 1950s male culture saw computer as a boring career worth of only women. Note literally computer, sitting down with a piece of paper and calculating some figure by hand - a human spreadsheet if it were. Computer morphed into computer programmer with the advent of electronic computers, and soon afterwards men got involved. Feminists made big advances at the same time and so it is hard to separate which factor (o…
AFAICT men started to get involved when men started to notice that you could hit the jackpot and become a billionaire, or at least have a decent shot at becoming a millionaire.
It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in. And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental l…
This article implies that the correlation between gender-opportunity and representation in STEM is a causation. Look at the chart in the article, look at the countries on each end of the opportunity spectrum. There are many obvious economic, societal, and cultural differences between the countries on one side and the other of that spectrum. To take this correlation and use it to forward a sexist idea (that women PREF…
You’d need to try really hard to disprove different interest of men and women, as literature suggests differences from a very young age, even before those children have chances to meet their peers.
You’re just giving alternative explanations, which given the left side of the chart are much, much less likely. The economic argument also doesn’t make sense. STEM jobs may be among the highest paying ones, but certainly are not THE highest (not to mention the amount of effort compared to different high pay jobs).
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I am talking about relative levels of sexism in the present, not in the 60s and 70s.
But the 60's and 70's are when the representation levels started really diverging. That's the key part. That they may be less sexist now, after having achieved gender parity or something close to it, is hardly unexpected. Of course a field with roughly even numbers is usually going to be less sexist than one dominated by one gender or another.
Maybe we should not be asking why there are so few women doing it but why there are so many men doing it.
Almost nobody who studied physics ends up doing physics.
Both men and women will do unfulfilling jobs if they need the money, but when it comes to investing into a career, women will more often choose one that leads to interesting and fulfilling jobs, while men tend to select for "return on investment". Men are much more likely than women to invest into an career that only has unfulfilling but well-paying job prospects.
I view this is a defect in men, not a sign of oppression. Men are the victim of reactionary gender stereotypes and think they have to study something that will lead to them being able to provide for a family.
Look at, for example, container ship crew or workers on an oil platform. Clearly both genders can do those jobs, but almost only men will actually do it. Oil workers are getting paid exceptionally well. Not sure about container ship crews, maybe that was not a great example.